


between the lines, with you and i

by lightgetsin



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-12-24
Updated: 2002-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:47:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightgetsin/pseuds/lightgetsin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set in the summer after season 3. Justin knows he has to mean a hell of a lot to Ben for Ben to even consider what they do together, and there's something desperately sweet in that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	between the lines, with you and i

Ben comes in just after eleven. Justin catches him out of the corner of his eye as he’s delivering food to a couple who don’t even stop arguing in low, hissed voices to acknowledge him or it. Ben tosses him a casual, friendly smile, and Justin returns it as Ben moves to sit in his section.

Deb beats him to the table, and Justin veers off with a shrug. He can’t blame her for fawning all over Ben whenever he comes in. He’s the closest to Michael she’s been able to get in nearly a month. Justin knows how she feels—he’s found himself dropping by the Munchers a few times now, just to play with Gus, to see his eyes and the familiar shape of his chin. The difference is, of course, that Michael’s boyfriend is fleeing from the law with their sort of maybe pseudo kid, and Justin’s is still in Pittsburgh. Physically, anyway. Justin stopped trying to follow Brian around mentally after the second week when the phone lines were shut off in the loft and Brian laughed about it. It wasn’t a good laugh.

The diner is mostly empty. It’s a Tuesday, and what little rush there is on the weekdays happens in the early evening. Justin takes his time sauntering around the tables, taking orders, delivering food, and cleaning up as people trickle out. He tells Deb to go home fifteen minutes before midnight, promising that he’s fine closing by himself.

“Thanks, Sunshine,” she says, kissing him on the cheek and stripping off her apron. “I’m wiped.” She casts a quick look over at Ben, hunched alone at his table, a book open before him and a pot of coffee at his elbow. “Make sure he eats something, will you?”

“Sure,” Justin says, and shoos her out the door.

The last few customers get the hint when he starts washing down all the tables. Justin flips the sign to ‘closed’ as soon as the last couple are out the door. He leans a moment on the closest booth, bending his head to stretch out his neck and shoulders. He’s been on since noon, and he aches all over.

When he straightens up, Ben is behind him, hands in his pockets, his eyes steady and direct.

“Want help cleaning up?” he says.

Justin looks straight back. Ben looks tired, but calm. “I’ll do the dishes.”

They work in easy, companionable silence. Justin scrubs plates and glasses and silverwear, and he has to work hard to keep on top of the pile Ben heaps on the counter beside him. The work is habitual, like driving a familiar route, subconcentration barely on the radar, leaving room for plenty of other thoughts. Like whether Brian will be at the loft when he gets home. He can never tell nowadays. Brian will either stumble in at four A.M. smelling of Beam and the Baths, or he’ll be at home waiting for Justin in an old pair of pajamas and an absent, shocky sort of smile. Both options have their own particular freakiness. He catches Ben moving around the diner out of the corner of his eye, and he knows instinctively that a congruent circle of thought is passing through Ben’s mind, something about an empty apartment and phone calls from the police and what it’s like when you’re significant other or whatever the fuck takes a holiday from reality and leaves you to hold down the fort.

His hands are a little wrinkly by the time he gets through the dishes. They feel abraided and over sanitized from the industrial strength cleanser in the water, and Justin has to pat them dry with the rough dish towel. Not quite what most people would consider artist’s hands, he knows. But he hasn’t been drawing much lately, and what has come from his pencils isn’t the sort of thing he can show anyone. Justin Taylor is not supposed to be drawing pictures of his sort of boyfriend’s childhood best friend’s boyfriend, and when was it that his life turned into a Jerry Springer episode?

When he turns to set the towel down, Ben is waiting for him, just a foot away. Justin steps into him without pause, and they stand a moment, just holding each other, before Ben tilts his head back with a finger under his chin and kisses him.

There’s an old, battered couch in the tiny break room. They’ve spent nights there before, cramped and uncomfortable and poked with springs, and they both know there’s a perfectly good bed at Ben’s apartment and no one will find them there, but they also know that that’s Ben and Michael’s bed. The couch is theirs, and sometimes, in the middle of a double shift that he scheduled for himself because he simply couldn’t sit in the gutted loft any longer and watch the Brian zombie move like a ghost through his gutted life, Justin comes back here and sits on the couch and imagines he can smell them here, feel the heat of their bodies still in the cushions. He doesn’t allow himself this often, he doesn’t allow himself to think of it at all during the day when he can help it, but sometimes he can’t not.

It should be a lot dirtier than it is, Justin thinks, not for the first time as Ben cups his cock through his jeans, massaging in a slow, twisting motion from the wrist. It should have the tang of forbidden, the spice of elicit. And it does, but that’s not why they keep doing it.

They lie pressed close together on the couch, moving awkwardly as they undress each other in the cramped space. The roughened skin on Justin’s hands catches a little on the fabric of Ben’s shirt, and then on the mat of hair on his chest. Justin rubs his palm there, knowing the friction of their skin is pulling a little. He brushes his hand over one nipple, then the other, smiling as Ben sighs.

He should probably also be more scared than he is, he knows, as Ben smoothes on a condom. He never lets Justin do it, never let’s Justin even think about touching his dick without one. Justin knows that Ben will probably be dead before Justin turns thirty, and he should be more scared that he’s sleeping with a guy who’s infected. But the truth is, he’s not, because he’s sleeping with a guy who’s infected. He’s sleeping with a guy who doesn’t fuck people lightly, who takes the responsibility of other people’s lives on his shoulders. Justin knows he has to mean a hell of a lot to Ben for Ben to even consider what they do together, and there’s something desperately sweet in that, something he didn’t know he was missing.

Ben keeps him on his back, and Justin lifts one leg over the back of the couch and the other over his shoulder. He holds Ben’s forearms as he pushes into him, and the nibble of Ben’s teeth on his lips makes him break out in a prickling sweat all over. They set a slow, steady pace, and Ben stays lying close atop him, the slow tempo of their bodies pressing Justin’s dick between them in rolling pulses. Pittsburg in the summer is stiflingly hot, and the tiny break room is hotter. The scent of their sweat is sharp, earthy, piercing the atmosphere of strange detachment they’ve created around themselves with their silence. It’s real and undeniable, and Justin claws at Ben’s back, pulls him close and then closer. It’s not about the orgasm, though that is certainly good, coming long and shuddering with dick still hard in him, and a large hand working his own cock. It’s about the smell of their sweat, the way Justin has let his hands go this summer, like a former debutante foregoing acrylics, and even a nail file. It’s about how Brian is in his blood and his brain and his bones, but there’s more to him than the viscera now, there has to be when his diner paycheck is the only money coming in, and Brian isn’t able to reach anything beyond his own weird crisis of faithlessness. He doesn’t know how it is with Ben and Michael, and he doesn’t even know Ben that well, really, but he imagines it’s sort of the same with him.

Ben gasps into his neck, bites his earlobe, pushes his leg up higher. Justin moves with him, languid and satiated, and they kiss when Ben comes.

They’re doing what they can, Justin thinks, wrapping both arms around Ben’s sweaty back, for themselves and each other, because right now there’s no one else who will.


End file.
